Re:How the IBM PC Won, Then Lost, the Personal Computer Market
by mschuster91 on Thursday July 22, 2021 @08:31AM
(#27918073)
> Anyway, I know that the mainframe market is pretty healthy, but who are the clients?
Banks, insurance companies and airlines. The amount of only-documented-in-code corner cases and custom business logic is immense (for the really old, up to 60 years!) which means rewrites are immensely difficult and expensive (and prone to failure), the amount of government regulation and the fines for when things go south (aka people lose money) is equally massive, and the companies are ruled by beancounters by definition which means they will, as long as IBM has mainframes and support for them, go with keeping their mainframe stuff to "never touch a running system".
That is part of why fintech start-ups are eating the old banks and insurance companies alive... they can design proper systems from scratch without having to take care of decades of accumulated cruft that needs to be migrated and especially they don't have to retain horribly outdated and complex business logic, workflows and processes that would take old-school companies billions of dollars to re-train their staff - almost 2 million people in 2019, per https://www.statista.com/statistics/250220/ranking-of-united....
Banks, insurance companies and airlines. The amount of only-documented-in-code corner cases and custom business logic is immense (for the really old, up to 60 years!) which means rewrites are immensely difficult and expensive (and prone to failure), the amount of government regulation and the fines for when things go south (aka people lose money) is equally massive, and the companies are ruled by beancounters by definition which means they will, as long as IBM has mainframes and support for them, go with keeping their mainframe stuff to "never touch a running system".
That is part of why fintech start-ups are eating the old banks and insurance companies alive... they can design proper systems from scratch without having to take care of decades of accumulated cruft that needs to be migrated and especially they don't have to retain horribly outdated and complex business logic, workflows and processes that would take old-school companies billions of dollars to re-train their staff - almost 2 million people in 2019, per https://www.statista.com/statistics/250220/ranking-of-united....